Friday, cigarette #2Also from A Formal Feeling Comes: Poems in Form by Contemporary Women:A Reply from His Coy MistressSir, I am not a bird of prey:A Lady does not seize the day.I trust that brief Time will unfoldour youth before he makes us old.How could we two write lines...
Friday, February 29, 2008
Thursday, February 28, 2008
Sonnets are born free, and everywhere are in chains
Friday, cigarette #1I can freely leave an unfinished free-verse poem to prepare a meal, sleep, have a drink with friends, but a formal poem seems to follow me everywhere and makes me hard to live with. Mona Van Duyn, A Formal Feeling Comes: Poems in Form by Contemporary WomenI...
Blogwatch: As if going out on a Saturday night weren't performative enough already...
Thursday, cigarette #11. Forget campuses, ТКБ takes a look at the Visigothic Rape Industry.2. Snuh posts a Friday Five that includes an mp3 of "Papa was a Running Dog Lackey of the Bourgeoisie," which is an O'Jays-style soul verison of The Communist Manifesto from the 1970's...
Wednesday, February 27, 2008
I don't know what conservatism is, but if you hum a few bars I can fake it...
Wednesday, cigarette #2The idea that there’s a difference between making a contract with the community (which is what Jonathan Rauch thinks marriage is) and entering into a tradition (which is what Eve Tushnet thinks marriage is) has been making the rounds in the Yale Compulsive...
Meaning, Existentialism & Gender Roles: Broockman gets nausea, Eve gets vertigo, Housemate Dara gets creative
Wednesday, cigarette #1Last night's YPU prize debate on gender roles (Resolved: Conform to traditional gender roles) was, with a few exceptions, no fun. None of the men wore dresses! Only one of the men wore a burqa! Not one of the speakers in the negative spoke in favor...
Monday, February 25, 2008
Are AFF roundtables on marriage outdated?
Monday, cigarette #3When we marry, the choice is voluntary, but the duties are not a matter of choice. Edmund BurkeI had been planning to go to the AFF roundtable "Is Marriage Outdated?" on a swing through DC, but Mike Gravel rescheduled his YPU appearance at the last minute....
St. Aelred: No one ever so lacked a Boswell!
Monday, cigarette #2The spoken, not the written, word was his proper vehicle; and no one ever so lacked a Boswell. Karl E. Beckson, Oscar Wilde: The Critical HeritageJohn Boswell suggests one reason why being able to talk about purity might be helpful to Christians:Though shalt...
Brutus: honorable man or enemy combatant? Film at 11.
Monday, cigarette #1Brutus even dares tell his friends that if his own father returned to earth, he would kill him just the same. It was an overpowering love of country which, taking leave of the ordinary rules for crimes and virtues, hearkened only to itself and saw neither...
Tuesday, February 19, 2008
"Can't squeeze nothin' past William Howard Taft!"
Tuesday, cigarette #1Posting will be light as the senior essay heats up (should be back Thursday), so have a little blogwatch in the meantime:Songs:Illinois reports on Of Great and Mortal Men: 43 Songs about 43 U.S. Presidencies. Hurry over for mp3's of "Andrew Jackson" and...
Sunday, February 17, 2008
CSB: We Read Two-Bit Queer Theory So You Don't Have To!
Sunday, cigarette #2From Stanley Booth as quoted in Dusty in Memphis (33 1/3 series) by Warren Zanes:A gay friend told me he'd never understood Tennessee Williams until he came to Memphis. I'd lent him a second-story apartment with no air conditioning. He said to want to have...
Sunday Morning Words to Live By: "Go on your nerve"
Sunday, cigarette #1From "Personism: A Manifesto" by Frank O'Hara:I don’t believe in god, so I don’t have to make elaborately sounded structures. I hate Vachel Lindsay, always have; I don’t even like rhythm, assonance, all that stuff. You just go on your nerve. If someone’s...
Saturday, February 16, 2008
A Zoroastrian, a Catholic, and a Rabbi walk into a bar. Is the bar clean or unclean?
Saturday, cigarette #2I've been threatening to write about purity for a week now, and I suppose it's no good waiting for something timely and purity-related to show up in the news, so here goes nothin':1.) Zoroastrian Purity Laws: "Wait, did you say unconsecrated bull's urine?"Among...
Saturday Morning Dose of Puritan Poetry
Saturday, cigarette #1Women are books in which we often spySome blotted lines, and sometimes lines awry,And though perhaps some straight ones intervene,In all of the errata may be seen.If it be so I wish my wife wereAn almanack – to change her every year.An impromptu response:“Women...
Friday, February 15, 2008
"Good day for ducks, isn't it?" "Why, yes, the men are well-dressed..."
Friday, cigarette #1The Abyss has done some comparative marriage theory, drawing a distinction between Iris Murdoch & John Bayley, who wanted "to preserve their singular lives within their shared space, like 'two animals in a field,'" and Sheldon & Jean Vanauken, who...
Thursday, February 14, 2008
Two from the humor archives
Thursday, cigarette #3I really should give each of these its own post, not because they each deserve it (although they do) but because I've had more than three cigarettes today. By a factor of seven. At least.First, fun with cafeteria comment cards:There are two things I like...
He's right, of course, but what's "owl-light?"
Thursday, cigarette #2Anti-Climacus points us towards a neat quote:Even today the Northern visitor hankers to see eroded hills and rednecks…to sniff the effluvium of backwoods-and-sandhill subhumanity and to see at least one barn burn at midnight. So he looks at me with crafty...
When Harry & Sally Met the Party of the Left
Thursday, cigarette #1When I got off the floor of the Party of the Left's debate (Resolved: Men and Women Can Never Be Friends, a joint debate with the Conservative Party) the President of the Union told me I was what was wrong with America. This is almost certainly true, but...
Wednesday, February 13, 2008
Burkean Veils: Now 50% more politic and well-wrought!
Wednesday, cigarette #1Nicola treads on my turf by quoting Burke in reference to Sex Week at Yale:All the decent drapery of life is to be rudely torn off. All the super-added ideas, furnished from the wardrobe of a moral imagination, which the heart owns and the understanding...
Tuesday, February 12, 2008
Urban Traditionalism: "When a man is tired of Adams Morgan, he is tired of life."
Tuesday, cigarette #2"The Prince of Wales is from Richmond. England, not Virginia. He does not have enough relatives to be from Virginia."Several students in "What is Conservatism?" expressed agreement with Russell Kirk's kvetch that "veneration dies on the pavements," and...
Cigarette etiquette according to Oscar Wilde
Tuesday, cigarette #1From The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde:When Pierre Louÿs wrote to André Gide about the elegant customs and manners of Oscar and his disciples, he was charmed by the way 'X,' a young man to whom he had just been introduced, offered him a cigarette. 'Instead...
Monday, February 11, 2008
The Chaste Right-Wing Conspiracy: "One Kiss Don't Make a Summer..."
Monday, cigarette #2MUSIC: "Add Your Light to Mine, Baby," Lucky SoulI've seen you dancing like no one was lookingBeneath the fullest moon,Oh, someday soon I'm gonna find all the things I've been yearning for,Are you coming too?Reader JWB rejects the possiblity of a girl group...
Gearing Up for Sex Week at Yale with some Pretty Creepy Literary Criticism
Monday, cigarette #1The Everlasting Cigarette of ChastityBluntly equating literary discourse with sexual intercourse, Wister indicates [in The Virginian] that a cowboy can make love to a woman only by first gaining intellectual access to her through an acquaintance with canonical...
Saturday, February 9, 2008
Two-Four-Six-Eight! We Ain't Gonna Fornicate!
Saturday, cigarette #1The council of Toledo (400 AD) declined to excommunicate a man who lived faithfully with a concubine. But half a century later, Pope Leo ruled that a previous relationship with a concubine did not exclude marriage: this was not bigamy, but moral improvement....
Tuesday, February 5, 2008
Watch This Space
Posting resumes tomorrow. Topics include:Why can't Christianity talk about ritual "purity" in the way that Zoroastrians and rabbinic Jews can?The Yale Women's Political Forum is having a round-table on "hook-up culture" tomorrow. Will Yours Very Truly be able to make her case...
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